Social Marketing Tips For Twitter

When it comes to social media, no one “gets it” as well as Twitter. Apparently Twitter has some 75 million user accounts, with about 15 million of that total being active users. See http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru . That’s a lot of people sending a lot of Tweets. This micro-blogging service makes it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs to stay in touch with those who choose to follow them, and stay updated on new products, services, special offers, industry news and more. It’s a win-win for both the Tweeter, and their followers.When it comes to using Twitter, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it. Your messages must be kept short, under 140 characters, and they need to be helpful or informative. Don’t carry on about what you ate for breakfast, or the fact that you just brushed your teeth. People will unfollow you faster than they can hit the button, even if you do have good oral habits.

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now and here’s what I’ve found works best when participating in this close knit community of few words.

1) Regular Postings: Now I’m not saying you need to post every day, although that would be nice. You do need to make an appearance on a regular basis. It’s like school – you need to show up to pass. Be a contributor that your followers get to really know and look forward to your Tweets. If you’re the type of person who needs to plan ahead, you can always use a service that allows you to schedule tweets in advance, such as http://www.socialoomph.com/

2) Retweet: If you see Tweets posted by other users that you think your followers would like, then retweet them. It only takes one click, and you’ll also be creating goodwill with other Twitter users at the same time. If you’d like, you can add a personal thought or comment before sending it. Also, make it easy for others to retweet your posts by adding RT buttons to your website or blog. It’s easy with http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button

3) Be Helpful: Keep in mind Twitter is a form of social Media, so social interaction is key. It’s not all about you. Whenever an opportunity arises to answer a question, participate in a survey, or help solve a problem, do so. In this way you’re participating in the community. This also will help your brand and image when others know they can count on you for support or feedback.

4) Don’t Be A Follow CopyCat: Don’t follow everyone who follows you. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to Twitter. So many people turn this feature on to auto follow those who follow them. Why would you want to do this? I’d prefer that those I follow are people and topics I’ve hand-selected that interest me, and not a mish-mash of followers who may be ranting about things I have no interest in. Be selective in who you follow or your Twitter stream could quickly fill up with junk or spam. For quality people to follow, see – http://followontwitterlists.com/

5) What to Tweet: Make sure that the tweets you post are helpful and/or informative. Late breaking news pertaining to your industry, as well as any specials or sales you may have going on are always good topics. If you find something you think your followers would like, especially if it’s free or a bargain, share the love. Plus, if your tweets are good, it will encourage others to retweet them. For ideas see – http://www.artbizblog.com/2009/07/what-to-tweet.html

6) Comment: Particpate in the community by commenting on other people’s tweets. If you can answer a question, do so. It never hurts and people really will appreciate it when you take the time to comment on what they have to say. It lets them know that others are actually listening to what they have to say in the “Twitterverse”.

7) Say Thank You: When someone takes the time to retweet one of your tweets, make sure to reply to them with a “thank you”. Manners rule online as well as off, and they’ll like the fact that you noticed the retweet and took the time to show some gratitude. It may even inspire them to retweet more of your tweets in the future.

Be Personal: Again, I don’t need to know what you ate for dinner, but every now and then you should show your human side with a creative thought, quote, or other statement. Let people know you’re “real” and not just a lean mean business machine. You want to tread lightly in this area. Too personal is overkill, but a little can help in establishing a connection with your followers.

9) Post Pictures/Video: Remember, Twitter is not just for text. It’s easy to post short videos, and pictures too. It’s nice to mix it up a little and share content in other formats as well. Here are some resources http://freenuts.com/video-sharing-websites-for-twitter/

10) Talk About More Than Yourself: It’s not all about you, so please don’t make all your tweets one big marketing message, such as only tweeting about your latest press release, blog posting, or article that was published. No one will want to follow you if you’re one big commercial. Yes, some of this is fine in moderation, but you need to walk a fine line and mix it up with other helpful, interesting topics.

Now it’s time to start putting these tips into action. Social media is all about participating and listening to what others have to say. It’s all about creating and sharing information and becoming part of the community. If you approach Twitter in this fashion, you’ll not only have a lot more fun, but your followers will like and respect you – and if that doesn’t strengthen your brand, nothing will.

Facebook and Twitter Links – How Does Google Rate & View These?

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates?

Essentially, Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that. It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. the response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently?

How To Search Twitter Like an Expert And Aid Traffic Generation…

The Internet is overloaded with content. The problem is not finding information — it’s about finding the right information. Search and different methods of filtering have become more important today than ever before, because of this information overload.

We previously told you that you have to search Google like a pro. Today it’s Twitter’s turn. Twitter Search can be a powerful tool for helping to achieve many daily Twitter-related tasks, such as monitoring your company and industry; finding new people to follow and attracting new followers.

6 Tips for Better Twitter Searching

1. Switch to Advanced Search – You may be familiar with standard Twitter Search, but if you want some deeper searching power, try using Advanced Twitter Search. With advanced search, users have an entire page of operators. For example, you can look for tweets containing a keyword that were sent by a particular user. If you run a local business, you can search for tweets near a specific location. Both of these tasks could help provide a targeted and relevant list of people to follow on Twitter.

2. Use Exact Match – When looking for only a specific phrase of words on Twitter, use exact match. This can be done in advanced search or by including quotes around your search phrase “sample search phrase”. This is often important for long search phrases that can return many irrelevant results due to pulling results for each individual word in the phrase.  

3. Subtract Words That Muck Up Results – Even using exact match, the results you find may not be clear enough. Often business that you are searching for may share names with other organizations or products. The best way to solve this problem is to remove keywords related to the irrelevant results. This is done by placing a minus sign in front of the words you want removed from inclusion in the results.

For example, let’s say you are looking for tweets mentioning Bayer, but you only want tweets from their Crop Science Division. Your search box may look something like this: “Bayer Crop Science” -aspirin -chemical -pharma.

4. Examine Sentiment – As marketers, a common question that gets asked is sentiment. Do people like our company? Twitter can help answer this question. Twitter allows you to search for positive and negative search results. This might not be the level of detail some marketers are looking for, but it is a start. Search for sentiment is simple by including a “:)” for positive and “:(” for negative. Example: For negative tweets about your competitor enter: “competitor name”

5. Filter for Only Links – Sometimes searching Twitter is not about what people are sharing and instead about the links that people are sharing. Fortunately, Twitter provides a way to filter for only tweets containing links. This filtering is done by adding filter:links following your search phrase. Example: “search phrase” filter:links 

6. Put Everything Together – Learning different Twitter search commands is valuable, but there’s a second, even more valuable step: Putting multiple search operators together to find clear and targeted results that will ultimately help save time and deliver actionable information. Say you wanted to find results for a specific phrase that was shared by another company that you don’t care about, but you only wanted the positive results that contained links, this is what that would look like: Example: “Search Phrase” -”phrase you don’t care about” filter:links

Bonus Tip: RSS Feeds for Search Results -  One problem with Twitter search results is that many of us want to see the data and information over time, instead of only the couple of minutes after we search for it. Twitter make it easy to do this by providing RSS feed for search results pages. In the right side bar of the results page, click the “feed for this query” link and then add that feed to an RSS reader and you can easily track specific search results over time.

Twitter Search is powerful, you can find a complete list of search operators on Twitter.

Do you have other Twitter Search tips that you use?

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

Want to learn more about using Twitter for Marketing and PR?

How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that. It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. the response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently?

Twitter And Traffic…

I’ve been using Twitter heavily over the past month (5500 followers and counting!).  I would like to share with you some of the things I do to grow my network and (just as important) to retain the people that I have in my network already.

Share interesting pieces of information

If I’m reading a particularly interesting blog post or news story then I will tweet the URL.  Not only am I helping my followers by giving them some useful info but I’m also helping the author of the blog.   If I’m lucky then I may even end up with them following ME and tweeting MY blog posts to their followers.  If they have many thousands followers then I’ll attract new followers and website hits.

I also encourage people to ask me questions about search engine optimisation and website marketing.  Not only does it help them but it gives me an excuse to show what I an expert I am in front of 5000 people.  If the advice that I give is particularly useful then my followers may re-tweet it to their followers, who may then follow me.

Interact with my followers

I often ask my followers questions.  There are a few reasons for this.  It nearly always gets a discussion going and gives me things to tweet about.  And often people are just looking for a reason to start tweeting but don’t necessarily have something to say – me asking them a question gives them a reason to tweet.   

Finally, I love to hear from people that are following me – they often have great insights and great stories to share, so I generally always get something beneficial from it.

Interact with the people I’m following

As well as asking people questions I’ll often respond to other people’s tweets.  I follow people with similar interests so I nearly always have something to say.  By having a dialogue with people (regardless of who they are) I have learned loads, acquired new followers and even won a stack of new business!

Really, the key thing about Twitter is to interact with people.  Don’t worry about the ‘big’ names on Twitter – if you can build your own large network of people that like what YOU are doing then you can start to enjoy the benefits of a large Twitter network.

If you want to join the fun then follow me on Twitter!